AAAI 2025 Papers

Abstraction is key to scaling up reinforcement learning (RL). However, autonomously learning abstract state and action representations to enable transfer and generalization remains a challenging open problem. This paper presents a novel approach for inventing, representing, and utilizing options, which represent temporally extended behaviors, in continual RL settings. Our approach addresses streams of stochastic problems characterized by long horizons, sparse rewards, and unknown transition and reward functions. Our approach continually learns and maintains an interpretable state abstraction, and uses it to invent high-level options with abstract symbolic representations. These options meet three key desiderata: (1) composability for solving tasks effectively with lookahead planning, (2) reusability across problem instances for minimizing the need for relearning, and (3) mutual independence for reducing interference among options. Our main contributions are approaches for continually learning transferable, generalizable options with symbolic representations, and for integrating search techniques with RL to efficiently plan over these learned options to solve new problems. Empirical results demonstrate that the resulting approach effectively learns and transfers abstract knowledge across problem instances, achieving superior sample efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Human motion generative models have enabled promising applications, but the ability of text-to-motion (T2M) models to produce realistic motions raises security concerns if exploited maliciously. Despite growing interest in T2M, limited research focus on safeguarding these models against adversarial attacks, with existing work on text-to-image models proving insufficient for the unique motion domain. In the paper, we propose ALERT-Motion, an autonomous framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate targeted adversarial attacks against black-box T2M models. Unlike prior methods that modify prompts through predefined rules, ALERT-Motion uses the knowledge of LLMs of human motion to autonomously generate subtle yet powerful adversarial text descriptions. It comprises two key modules: an adaptive dispatching module that constructs an LLM-based agent to iteratively refine and search for adversarial prompts; and a multimodal information contrastive module that extracts semantically relevant motion information to guide the agent's search. Through this LLM-driven approach, ALERT-Motion produces adversarial prompts querying victim models to produce outputs closely matching targeted motions, while avoiding obvious perturbations. Evaluations across popular T2M models demonstrate ALERT-Motion's superiority over previous methods, achieving higher attack success rates with stealthier adversarial prompts. This pioneering work on T2M adversarial attacks highlights the urgency of developing defensive measures as motion generation technology advances, urging further research into safe and responsible deployment.

Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized decision-making processes in dynamic environments, yet it often struggles with autonomously detecting and achieving goals without clear feedback signals. For example, in a Source Term Estimation problem, the lack of precise environmental information makes it challenging to provide clear feedback signals and to define and evaluate how the source's location is determined. To address this challenge, the Autonomous Goal Detection and Cessation (AGDC) module was developed, enhancing various RL algorithms by incorporating a self-feedback mechanism for autonomous goal detection and cessation upon task completion. Our method effectively identifies and ceases undefined goals by approximating the agent's belief, significantly enhancing the capabilities of RL algorithms in environments with limited feedback. To validate effectiveness of our approach, we integrated AGDC with deep Q-Network, proximal policy optimization, and deep deterministic policy gradient algorithms, and evaluated its performance on the Source Term Estimation problem. The experimental results showed that AGDC-enhanced RL algorithms significantly outperformed traditional statistical methods such as infotaxis, entrotaxis, and dual control for exploitation and exploration, as well as a non-statistical random action selection method. These improvements were evident in terms of success rate, mean traveled distance, and search time, highlighting AGDC's effectiveness and efficiency in complex, real-world scenarios.

Within the Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) industry, engineers manually create documents based on engineering drawings, which can be time-consuming and prone to human error. For example, the expansion of typical assemblies of instrument items (Instrument Typicals) in Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams (P&IDs) is a labor-intensive task. Each Instrument Typical assembly is depicted in the P&IDs via a simplified representation showing only a subset of the utilized instruments. The expansion activity involves recording all utilized instruments to create an instrument item list document based on the P&IDs for a particular EPC project. Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence (AI) could help to automate this process. In this paper, we propose the first method for automating the process of Instrument Typical expansion in P&IDs. The method utilizes computer vision techniques and domain knowledge rules to extract information about the Instrument Typicals from a project's P&IDs and legend sheets. Subsequently, the extracted information is used to automatically generate the listing of all utilized instruments. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated on P&IDs from large industrial EPC projects, resulting in precision rates exceeding 98% and recall rates surpassing 99%. These results demonstrate the suitability of our method for industrial deployment. The successful application of our method has the potential to reduce engineering costs and increase the efficiency of EPC projects. Furthermore, the method could be adapted for additional applications in the EPC industry, which highlights the method's industrial value.

Large language models (LLMs) now turn their attention to search. Recently, Thought of Search (ToS) proposed defining the search space with code, having an LLM produce that code. ToS requires a human in the loop, collaboratively producing a sound successor function and goal test, achieving impressive 100% accuracy on all the tested datasets. In this work, we automate ToS (AutoToS), completely taking the human out of the loop of solving planning problems. AutoToS guides the language model step by step towards the generation of sound and complete search components, through feedback from both generic and domain specific unit tests. We achieve 100% accuracy, with minimal feedback iterations, using LLMs of various sizes on all evaluated domains.

Constructing high-quality query-response pairs from custom corpora is crucial for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) large language models (LLMs) in many applications, like creating domain-specific AI assistants or roleplaying agents. However, sourcing this data through human annotation is costly, and existing automated methods often fail to capture the diverse range of contextual granularity and tend to produce homogeneous data. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel method named AUGCON, capable of automatically generating context-driven SFT data across multiple levels of granularity with high diversity, quality and fidelity. AUGCON begins by generating queries using the Context-SplitTree (CST), an innovative approach for recursively deriving queries and splitting context to cover full granularity. Then, we train a scorer through contrastive learning to collaborate with CST to rank and refine queries. Finally, a synergistic integration of self-alignment and self-improving is introduced to obtain high-fidelity responses. Extensive experiments are conducted incorporating both automatic and human evaluations, encompassing four widely-used benchmarks and a test scenario in English and Chinese. The results highlight the significant advantages of AUGCON in producing high diversity, quality, and fidelity SFT data against several state-of-the-art methods.

A vast amount of textual data is added to the internet daily, making utilization and interpretation of textual data difficult and cumbersome. As a result, automatic text summarization is crucial for extracting relevant information, saving precious time. Although many transformer models excel in summarization, they are constrained by their input size, preventing them from processing texts longer than their context size. This study introduces several novel algorithms that allow any LLM to efficiently overcome its input size limitation, effectively utilizing its full potential without any architectural modifications. We test our algorithms on texts with more than 70,000 words, and our experiments show a significant increase in BERTScore with competitive ROUGE scores.

One of the major techniques to tackle temporal planning problems is heuristic search augmented with a symbolic representation of time in the states. Augmenting the problem with composite actions (macro-actions) is a simple and powerful approach to create "shortcuts" in the search space, at the cost of augmenting the branching factor of the problem and thus the expansion time of a heuristic search planner. Hence, it is of paramount importance to select the right macro-actions and minimize the number of such actions to optimize the planner performance. In this paper, we first discuss a simple, yet powerful, model similar to macro-actions for the case of temporal planning, and we call these macro-events. Then, we present a novel ranking function to extract and select a suitable set of macro-events from a dataset of valid plans. In our ranking approach, we consider an estimation of the hypothetical search space for a blind search including a candidate set of macro-events under four different exploitation schemata. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that the proposed approach yields a substantial performance improvement for a state-of-the-art temporal planner.

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed vision and language modeling, Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) complements data-driven AI via a knowledge-driven approach, enhancing our understanding of the physical world. My work focuses on: 1) automating scientific reasoning with language models, 2) improving geometric interpretation, 3) developing foundation models for multiphysics.

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with tools significantly enhances their problem-solving potential across multifaceted tasks. However, current tools automatically created by LLMs often serve as a mere summary of specific problems or solutions, which face two main issues: 1) Low reusability: The tools are overly problem-specific and struggle to handle new problems. 2) Limited diversity: The toolsets are too narrow, limiting their application to address a broader range of different problems. In this paper, we propose the Knowledge-grounded Tool Creation with Evolution (KTCE) framework, which aims to craft reusable and comprehensive toolsets for LLMs in a two-stage process. In the first stage (Knowledge-based Tool Creation), we conceptualize tools as a form of executable domain knowledge and propose a problem-knowledge-tool paradigm. Specifically, we leverage LLMs to abstract "knowledge" from "problems" and create a three-layer knowledge tree of topics, concepts, and key points. This hierarchical structure serves as a foundation for inducing atomic "tools" from "knowledge", grounding them in fundamental concepts and enhancing their usability. In the second stage (Tool Evolutionary Search), we evolve the toolsets through several actions including tool selection, mutation, and crossover. This stage mimics the biological evolution process, aiding toolsets in discovering new tools or updating existing ones, thereby increasing the diversity of the toolset. Experiments on challenging mathematical/tabular/scientific reasoning tasks demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial accuracy improvements ranging from 6.23% to 18.49% on average. Moreover, in-depth analyses reveal the superior characteristics of our toolkit, including high reusability, high diversity, and high generalizability on cross-data/LLM performance with low complexity.

Assessing students' responses, especially natural language responses, is a major challenge in education. In general, in education contexts, automatically evaluating what learners do or say is important as it enables personalized instruction, e.g., based on what the learner knows tailored tasks and feedback are given to the learner. Recently, deep learning techniques led to state-of-the-art methods in NLP such as transformer-based methods which resulted in significant performance improvements for many NLP tasks such as text classification and question answering. However, there is not much work exploring such methods for assessing students' free answers, particularly in the context of code comprehension, which brings additional challenges as the student explanations include code references as well. This paper explores the potential of applying automated assessments methods using transformers to code comprehension. We fine-tuned pre-trained transformer models, including BERT, RoBERTa, CodeBERT, and SciBERT, to see how well they can automatically judge students' responses to code comprehension tasks. Our results demonstrate that these models can significantly enhance the accuracy and reliability of automated assessments, offering insights into how the latest NLP techniques can be leveraged in computer science education to support personalized learning experiences.

Advances in robotic control and sensing have propelled the rise of automated scientific laboratories capable of high-throughput experiments. However, automated scientific laboratories are currently limited by human intuition in their ability to efficiently design and interpret experiments in high-dimensional spaces, throttling scientific discovery. We present AutoSciLab, a machine learning framework for driving autonomous scientific experiments, forming a surrogate researcher purposed for scientific discovery in high-dimensional spaces. AutoSciLab autonomously follows the scientific method in four steps: (i) generating high-dimensional experiments (x) using a variational autoencoder (ii) selecting optimal experiments by forming hypotheses using active learning (iii) distilling the experimental results to discover relevant low-dimensional latent variables (z) with a ‘directional autoencoder’ and (iv) learning a human interpretable equation connecting the discovered latent variables with a quantity of interest (y = f (z)), using a neural network equation learner. We validate the generalizability of AutoSciLab by rediscovering a) the principles of projectile motion and b) the phase-transitions within the spin-states of the Ising model (NP-hard problem). Applying our framework to an open-ended nanophotonics problem, AutoSciLab discovers a new way to steer incoherent light emission beyond current state-of-the-art, defining a new structure(material)-property(light-emission) relationship governing the physical process using closed-loop noisy experimental feedback.

In real-world applications, spectral Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for processing diverse types of graphs. However, a single GNN often struggles to handle different graph types—such as homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs—simultaneously. This challenge has led to the manual design of GNNs tailored to specific graph types, but these approaches are limited by the high cost of labor and the constraints of expert knowledge, which cannot keep up with the rapid growth of graph data. To overcome these challenges, we introduce AutoSGNN, an automated framework for discovering propagation mechanisms in spectral GNNs. AutoSGNN unifies the search space for spectral GNNs by integrating large language models with evolutionary strategies to automatically generate architectures that adapt to various graph types. Extensive experiments on nine widely-used datasets, encompassing both homophilic and heterophilic graphs, demonstrate that AutoSGNN outperforms state-of-the-art spectral GNNs and graph neural architecture search methods in both performance and efficiency.

In this paper, we introduce AutoMV, an autonomous agent framework designed for generating real estate marketing videos. The framework integrates a diverse set of existing models into a tool library, allowing the agent to intelligently select and execute the appropriate tools. Given property images and text, the agent decomposes the task into manageable subtasks, generating storyline directives and corresponding camera movement trajectories to guide the video production process. By automatically applying video synthesis techniques and incorporating multimedia elements such as subtitles and background music, the agent transforms static real estate images into dynamic, visually appealing videos, thereby optimizing their impact for digital marketing purposes.

Automated machine learning (AutoML) is a collection of techniques designed to automate the machine learning development process. While traditional AutoML approaches have been successfully applied in several critical steps of model development (e.g. hyperparameter optimization), there lacks a AutoML system that automates the entire end-to-end model production workflow for computer vision. To fill this blank, we propose a novel request-to-model task, which involves understanding the user's natural language request and execute the entire workflow to output production-ready models. This empowers non-expert individuals to easily build task-specific models via a user-friendly language interface. To facilitate development and evaluation, we develop a new experimental platform called AutoMMLab and a new benchmark called LAMP for studying key components in the end-to-end request-to-model pipeline. Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is one of the most important components for AutoML. Traditional approaches mostly rely on trial-and-error, leading to inefficient parameter search. To solve this problem, we propose a novel LLM-based HPO algorithm, called HPO-LLaMA. Equipped with extensive knowledge and experience in model hyperparameter tuning, HPO-LLaMA achieves significant improvement of HPO efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential across various applications, but their use as AI copilots in complex and specialized tasks is often hindered by AI hallucinations, where models generate outputs that seem plausible but are incorrect. To address this challenge, we develop AutoFEA, an intelligent system that integrates LLMs with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to automate the generation of FEA input files. Our approach features a novel planning method and a graph convolutional network (GCN)-Transformer Link Prediction retrieval model, which enhances the accuracy and reliability of the generated simulations. The AutoFEA system proceeds with key steps: dataset preparation, step-by-step planning, GCN-Transformer Link Prediction retrieval, LLM-driven code generation, and simulation using CalculiX. In this workflow, the GCN-Transformer model predicts and retrieves relevant example codes based on relationships between different steps in the FEA process, guiding the LLM in generating accurate simulation codes. We validate AutoFEA using a specialized dataset of 512 meticulously prepared FEA projects, which provides a robust foundation for training and evaluation. Our results demonstrate that AutoFEA significantly reduces AI hallucinations by grounding LLM outputs in physically accurate simulation data, thereby improving the success rate and accuracy of FEA simulations and paving the way for future advancements in AI-assisted engineering tasks.

Time series forecasting (TSF) is essential in various domains, and recent advancements in diffusion-based TSF models have shown considerable promise. However, these models typically adopt traditional diffusion patterns, treating TSF as a noise-based conditional generation task. This approach neglects the inherent continuous sequential nature of time series, leading to a fundamental misalignment between diffusion mechanisms and the TSF objective, thereby severely impairing performance. To bridge this misalignment, and inspired by the classic Auto-Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) theory, which views time series as continuous sequential progressions evolving from previous data points, we propose a novel Auto-Regressive Moving Diffusion (ARMD) model to first achieve the continuous sequential diffusion-based TSF. Unlike previous methods that start from white Gaussian noise, our model employs chain-based diffusion with priors, accurately modeling the evolution of time series and leveraging intermediate state information to improve forecasting accuracy and stability. Specifically, our approach reinterprets the diffusion process by considering future series as the initial state and historical series as the final state, with intermediate series generated using a sliding-based technique during the forward process. This design aligns the diffusion model's sampling procedure with the forecasting objective, resulting in an unconditional, continuous sequential diffusion TSF model. Extensive experiments conducted on seven widely used datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing diffusion-based TSF models.

Text-driven Human-Object Interaction (Text-to-HOI) generation is an emerging field with applications in animation, video games, virtual reality, and robotics. A key challenge in HOI generation is maintaining interaction consistency in long sequences. Existing Text-to-Motion-based approaches, such as discrete motion tokenization, cannot be directly applied to HOI generation due to limited data in this domain and the complexity of the modality. To address the problem of interaction consistency in long sequences, we propose an autoregressive diffusion model (ARDHOI) that predicts the next continuous token. Specifically, we introduce a Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (cVAE) to learn a physically plausible space of continuous HOI tokens, thereby ensuring that generated human-object motions are realistic and natural. For generating sequences autoregressively, we develop a Mamba-based context encoder to capture and maintain consistent sequential actions. Additionally, we implement an MLP-based denoiser to generate the subsequent token conditioned on the encoded context. Our model has been evaluated on the OMOMO and BEHAVE datasets, where it outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both performance and inference speed. This makes ARDHOI a robust and efficient solution for text-driven HOI tasks.

Multi-interest recommendation constantly aspires to an oracle individual preference modeling approach, that satisfies the diverse and dynamic properties. Fueled by the deep learning technology, existing neural network (NN)-based recommender systems employ single-point or multi-point interest representation strategy to realize preference modeling,and boost the recommendation performance with a remarkable margin. However, as parameterized approximate functions, NN-based methods remain deficiencies with respect to the adaptability towards distinctive preference patterns cross different users and the calibration over the individual current intent. In this paper, we revisit multi-interest recommendation with the lens of stochastic process and Bayesian inference. Specifically, we propose to learn a distribution over functions to depict the individual diverse preferences rather than a unified function to approximate preference. Subsequently, the recommendation is encouraged with the uncertainty estimation which conforms to the dynamic shifting intent. Along these lines, we establish the connection between multi-interest recommendation and neural processes by proposing NP-Rec, which realizes the flexible multiple interests modeling and uncertainty estimation, simultaneously. Empirical study on 4 real world datasets demonstrates that our NP-Rec attains superior recommendation performances to several state-of-the-art baselines, where the average improvement achieves up to 13.94%.